Update

I was chosen today by the College of Engineering to go on a fully funded trip to Los Angeles in order to represent them at a conference and help recruit potential female graduate students.  I am pretty excited to have been chosen.  I am also presenting my research at a conference in Miami and a conference in Atlanta this semester.

DH has a  med school interview this week.  We are very busy.  Fingers crossed.

Stress

Random Note:  I watched this Ted Talk recently and found it very interesting and relevant.  I think it's worth a watch.

http://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend

Fast Sourdough-ish Bread

To be updated with recipe.  For now FOOD PICTURES : )

 

Ranch Buffalo Shredded Chicken

To be updated with recipe.  For now FOOD PICTURES : )

Pasta Salad

To be updated with recipe.  For now FOOD PICTURES : )

The littlest and cutest baby C joined the world this past weekend and I got to meet her.  

It was a very long weekend filled with driving and sitting in waiting rooms, but it was worth it.  She is absolutely adorable and it was very special to get to see and hold her just hours after she was born. Congrats to the new Mom and Dad.  We can't wait to spoil her in the years to come.

Yum

You know what's delicious? Waffles and ice cream!

Change

Life has been interesting recently.  It has taken me much longer than I expected to readjust to a new normal.  I honestly think that I thought that within a couple of weeks after the wedding that things would be taken care of and life would feel normal.  But there are just too many changes taking place for that to be true. Obviously there are the the post wedding projects like changing my name and writing thank you notes and the big changes like moving and DH's med school applications, but everything else feels in flux as well. My work is evolving quite significantly now that I am done with quals. I have submitted a paper to be published and started two new projects.  I have been accepted to give a presentation at our national conference and am planning on applying to a second conference this fall.  Fall classes start in two weeks and I am signed up to TA my first class in the spring.  Additionally most of my work friends are a year or more older than me and are starting to prepare for graduation at the end of the year.

Around us, a good friend of mine in town has recently gotten into a serious relationship and another close friend is getting married at the end of the month. DH's sister is getting married in October and his best man had a daughter this summer. My brother's wife is due any day now and my other brother just moved to the other side of the country.

This past weekend we drove down to visit and say goodbye to many of DH's grad school friends. Several are planning to graduate with him and one is moving to England for a tenure track position. The weekend before that we drove 8 hours each way to visit my grandmother who isn't feeling well.  In both cases it was lovely to see people but life certainly does not "feel normal".

Anyways, married life is weird so far. I do not mean to say anything bad about DH. We are thrilled to have gotten married and are excited to be living together. I have no questions or worries about being married but it is more of an adjustment than I expected. Being married and living together is different. Talks about finances and chores and future jobs are different.  I didnt really expect it and I can't exactly explain HOW it feels different...but as in everything else right now, things are changing. I like it...I'm just not used to it yet.

Soft Boiled Eggs

I will eat breakfast foods at any time of the day.  Cereal, bagels, quiche, waffles...for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or midnight snack.  They are always delicious.  I find that this is true for pizza as well, but I may have less people agree with me on that one.

I've decided recently that I like eating soft-boiled eggs and toast.  This may be aided by the fact that apparently in England they cut the toast into strips and refer to this meal as "eggs and soldiers"...which I find adorable.  As far as I know, eggs are nutritious, inexpensive, and a good source of protein so I am trying to eat them a little more often.

Since my first attempt at soft-boiled eggs was a bit of a fail:

Instructions

1. Fill a pot with water so that (when the eggs are added) there is at least a 1/2 inch of water above the eggs
2. Bring the water to a simmer
3. Using a cooking spoon, lower the eggs into the water and continue to simmer for 1 minute
4. Cover the pot, remove from the heat, and let it sit for approximately 6 minutes

At this point, you can run the pot under cold water and take out your soft-boiled eggs.  Some fancy people have egg cups so that they can simply cut off the top of the egg and eat it with a spoon.  I am not one of those people.  An uninformed person may try to peal the soft-boiled egg.  I tried this, it doesn't work well.  What does work?  Amazingly, if you smack the egg with a knife,  you can then break it in half and scoop the soft-boiled egg halves into a bowl.

Hedgehog Bags & Cage Liners

This is a project that was a LONG time coming.  I made hedgehog cage liners and fleece bags for DH's hedgehog about a year ago.  Shortly after that one of his friends also got a hedgehog and asked if I would make some liners and bags for her as well...IN NOVEMBER.  I said that I was happy to but in all honestly the process was complicated by the fact that I didn't really know how to sew.  The hedgehog supplies that I made for DH were my first sewing project.  A few months passed during which I forgot how to wind a bobbin and adjust the sewing machine tension...and so I procrastinated.With the wedding and moving and my qualifier done, I finally got around to pulling out my sewing machine.  Motivated by my desire to fix my bowl chair, I retaught myself some basic sewing skills and FINALLY got around to completing this project for my friend.  If she ever reads this:  I am sorry that it took me so long.

I found sewing instructions for a reversible hedgehog cuddle bag here.

1)  Cut 4 pieces of 10" x 12" squares of fleece

2)  Pin and sew two pieces of the same color fleece together along THREE SIDES (leaving one of the short sides un-sewn.

3)  Repeat step (2) with the other two pieces of fleece

4)  Turn one of the bags right-side-out and place it inside of the other bag as shown below.  You now have the "right sides" of each bag facing the other bag 

5)  Sew the two bags together around the opening of the bag, leaving about 3 inches.

6)  Pull all of the fabric through that hole to turn the entire bag right-side-out and sew up the hole.

The fleece cage liners were simply made by folding over, pinning, and sewing a 1-inch border to the appropriate size of fleece.

We cook: Pumpkin Bread

I made two big loaves of pumpkin bread yesterday, loosely following this recipe.  All I can say is YUM.  I love pumpkin bread...although between the pumpkin bread and the pumpkin beer I drank, I think that my stomach is getting confused and thinking that it's fall already.  I've been craving apple cider : )

Ingredients

• 1 (15 oz) can pumpkin puree
• 4 eggs
• 1 cup vegetable oil
• 2/3 cup water
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 2-1/2 cup sugar
• 3-1/2 cup flour
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1-1/2 tsp salt
• 3-1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 3/4 tsp ground ginger
• 1/2 tsp ground cloves
• 
  

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350 deg. F
2. Mix pumpkin, eggs, oil, water, vanilla, and sugar
3. Separately, combine all other dry ingredients
4. Stir dry ingredients into the pumpkin mixture
5. Pour into 2 greased 8" x 4" loaf pans
6. Bake for 60-70 minutes at 350 deg. F.

Bread is done when a toothpick or knife comes out clean.

 

DH Moves In (Part 3)

After a few weeks of slowly bringing DH's stuff up little by little, DH and I finally rented a moving truck and brought up the rest of his furniture and other items this past Wednesday.





















Oh my goodness do we have a lot of stuff.  SO. MUCH. STUFF.  I am very excited to have him here but this is possibly the biggest organizational challenge I have ever faced.  We both lived alone previously, have a whole new set of wonderful wedding presents, and are pack rats that do not want to throw anything away.  To give you an idea, we have:


3 tv stands/tables
2 beds
2 couches
1 bowl chair
1 futon
6 bookshelves
1 mini fridge
1 actual fridge
2 microwaves
5 coffee pots
4 sets of cooking pots...and so on

Our apartment has looked like this for a little while:

I know we are blessed and that it is better to have too much stuff than too little stuff, but it is kind of laughable trying to combine all of our furniture into one apartment.  We do not want to sell a lot of it because we may be living separately again temporarily if DH goes to medschool.  The apartment set-up is coming along but is far from done.

Our mini "accent wall" of knickknacks and collectibles:

The new bowl chair pillow and DH's giant comfy couch:

Our mug wall (because I love mugs and have too many to fit in 1 whole cupboard):

Other random update:  DH got his MCAT scores back! He did very well and I am very proud of him : )

We cook: Barbecue Pork

This is the first thing that we cooked with our slow cooker.  Being from SC, DH was very excited to make barbecue and I have to say it was delicious!  This was rather time consuming, but not very complicated and it made enough food for us to have 16 servings of meat (when eating about 1 sandwich worth at a time rather than stuffing your face...which is hard not to do with something like barbecue).  We've eaten half of the meat with dinner for a week and the other half is in the freezer.

DH bought about 5 lbs of pork.  I'm not sure how much it cost, we were hoping to wait for a slightly better sale but were too excited for BBQ!  Still, $15-$20 for 16 meals worth of meat is not too bad : )

YUM!

Ingredients

• Boston Butt Roast
• 1/4 cup water
• Onion
• 1 bottle of your favorite Barbecue Sauce
• Salt & Pepper

Instructions

1. Cut onion in half and place halves in crock pot
2. Add water to crock pot
3. Put pork on top of onion halves and salt and pepper the top slightly
4. Cover and cook on HIGH for 1 hour
5. Cook on LOW for 7 - 9 hours.  You know it's done when it is tender and easily pulls off of the bone/shreds and is not pink.
6. Remove meat, pour out fat, onions, and grease, and clean the pot.
7. Shred the meat with forks and put the shredded meat back into the cleaned crock pot
8. Add barbecue sauce (we used 1 full bottle of sauce but you may want slightly more or less depending on preference and how much meat there is)
9. Cook on low for 1 hour

If you want to freeze the meat, make sure to portion it into sizes that you will want to thaw together.

Bowl Chair Repair

I have an old bowl chair that I got when I was about 12.  We bought it from Wegmans and I was very excited about it.  It has since traveled with me from apartment to apartment, partially because of its light weight for transport and partially because I didn't own much furniture.  About a year ago, my roommate's cat had trouble getting to its new litter box location and set up using my bowl chair instead.  Sadly, we didn't notice for a couple of days and try though I might, I could not get the thing clean through washing or scrubbing.  The pillow to my bowl chair has therefore been sitting unused in the corner, waiting to be fixed.



Well apparently with all of the excitement of moving DH in and setting up the apartment, yesterday was the day.  It took me about 7 hours, but I think a good 2-2.5 of those hours was spent standing in Joann Fabric trying to pick a material.  Does this happen to anyone else?? I really think that the hardest part of most of my projects is picking a pattern/yarn/fabric that I know I will be stuck with.  These were my top two choices:

After talking to DH, I ended up going with the more colorful fabric.  It is technically an outdoor fabric and I like the idea that if we ever have a porch, we might end up using it out there. There were other fabrics that I liked better but they were significantly more expensive for the volume of fabric that I needed.  This fabric was 54" wide and only $20 a yard (compared to a lot of the upholstery fabric selling for $35-$40).  It was on a 50% off sale and I used an extra 20% off student discount.  So it only ended up costing me about $28 for over 3 yards!

Rip the seam apart to separate the material.  

Place the two pieces of fabric down - right-side-together - and place the old piece on top as a template.  

Trace the outline, pin the pieces together and cut off the extra material in the corners.  Sew around your traced outline, leaving about a 10 inch gap.  

Pull the material through the gap so that the material is right-side out.  Ta-da!

Now for the long part.  Sort out all of the stuffing that is bad and throw it away.  Pull apart all of the good stuffing into small fluffy pieces and stick them inside of the pillow.  Add additional stuffing that I had lying around.  This part took about 2-3 times as long as the actual sewing but if you do not pull all of the stuffing apart it will be lumpy and uncomfortable.  Finally, fold the open ends in and CAREFULLY sew the pillow closed right along the outside edge.

The finished product:

So glad it's done! The pillow ended up a little larger than I expected but its very fluffy and I'm glad to have my reading chair back.  The original pillow had a bunch of spots where the pillow top and bottom were sewn together.  I haven't decided whether I want to add those to this pillow or not. 

We cook: Roasted Almonds and Almond Butter

This is another "recipe" that I made just because I happen to have a lot of something. ALMONDS.  I bought a giant bag of almonds forever ago telling myself that they would be a healthy snack...turns out I don't love snacking on almonds.  So yesterday, I learned how to roast and butter almonds.  It is very simple and can hardly be called a recipe, but I was excited because I got to try out my food processor for the first time : ) To roast almonds, I placed them on a cookie sheet in a single layer and baked them for 15 minutes at 350 deg. F (turning the almonds once about half way through).  I had heard a lot about roasted almonds on other blogs, but the difference between roasted and raw almonds seemed pretty minor to me.  Maybe I am missing something.Next, I put the roasted almonds into the food processor and started grinding away.  Pictures of the progression are below.  You can apparently make nut butter without roasting the nuts, but the roasting is supposed to make them a little bit easier and faster to grind up and also give it a "warmer" flavor??  I roasted them because I was scared of breaking the food processor the first time I used it.

Note: at this point, I removed half of the almonds and ground them in two batches because I realized that I had started with too many.

I was surprised by how well the consistency turned out.  It's just like peanut butter but tastes like almonds.  One blog I read said that homemade nut butter is good for about 2 months in the refrigerator.  I wanted to add some honey to sweeten the spread a little bit but the same blog said that adding honey, sugar, or maple syrup was fine and to add it near the end of blending but that doing so shortened the shelf life to a week or two.  I don't think that I will eat it that fast, so I am just drizzling honey on top of the spread when I eat it.